Event Details

Our next History Research Seminar will be online, and we will host Kelly McDonough, from University of Texas at Austin who will present the paper 'Indigenous Knowledges and the Imperial Archive: Nahua Health, Illness, and Healing in the 1577 relaciones geográficas'.

Abstract: 'Scholars ⁠have made significant headway in articulating the histories of science and technologies in the Iberian colonial world, yet we still lack a comprehensive understanding of Indigenous contributions to this area. A significant challenge attempting to remedy this gap is the limited source material available in archives made for and by dominant culture, which tend to obscure or erase Indigenous knowledges and practices. The relaciones geográficas, bureaucratic surveys of Spanish-held territories of the Americas, are well-known to scholars and have been studied from a variety of angles. I propose, however, that we have not yet paid sufficient attention to the presence of Indigenous knowledges and practices embedded in the corpus. In my talk, I argue that thinking with a “technologies as systems” approach we can read the relaciones geográficas in a way that draws out Indigenous Plant Science and Technologies and its practitioners. Part meditation on methodological challenges and part suggestion of possibilities for meeting them, my talk provides a deep contextualization of the traces of Nahua health, illness, and healing modalities in the 46 relaciones geográficas manuscripts from the Archdiocese of Mexico and Tlaxcala. The goal in doing is to demonstrate how we can broaden our source base for the study of Indigenous knowledges in general, and IPST specifically, while re-establishing Indigenous “active presence” in archival materials where it can be difficult to see or hear.